Biography

Sandi Haber Fifield describes her work as being born of collisions and alignments. Since the 1980s she has explored the visual, psychological and formal possibilities of creating composite pictures, using an array of techniques to extend the photographic frame. Through juxtaposing disparate imagery, created and collected over time, Haber Fifield constructs a form of visual poetry, encouraging a protracted form of looking in which the viewer is asked to consider the relationship between seemingly unrelated images.

For her most recent series, Lineations (2015-2016), the artist combines manipulated photographs with drawings on vellum, blurring the boundary between the two. Using the camera to capture creeping vines, heavily laden branches, and textured wall surfaces, Haber Fifield may then adjust the color, or layer images on top of one another. Through adding her own drawn lines in graphite and wax pastel on vellum, she enhances the linear quality of the photographic image. The translucency of the vellum, which one may look both at and through, urges the viewer to consider the status of the photograph as a direct representation of reality, or a window onto the world.

Sandi Haber Fifield was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1956, and she lives and works in Connecticut. She received her MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1981 and soon thereafter received a New York State Creative Artists Program Grant. Her work is the subject of three monographs: After the Threshold (Kehrer Verlag); Between Painting and Picking (Charta); and Walking through the World (Charta).

Haber Fifield’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States including The Art Institute of Chicago; The DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Oakland Museum; The Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; and The St. Louis Museum. Her work is included in numerous major public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The High Museum, Atlanta.